{"id":3852,"date":"2011-09-30T16:44:39","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T20:44:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/?p=3852"},"modified":"2011-09-30T16:44:39","modified_gmt":"2011-09-30T20:44:39","slug":"the-morality-of-capital-punishment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2011\/09\/the-morality-of-capital-punishment.html","title":{"rendered":"The Morality of Capital Punishment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Capital<\/a>The recent execution of the questionably guilty Troy Davis<\/a> in Georgia has sparked a lot of discussion around whether or not the death penalty is “right”.\u00a0 The evidence<\/a> certainly supports the case that capital punishment is not a cost effective solution, nor is it an effective deterrent.\u00a0 It is applied with a decided racial bias, and its inherent irreversibility is problematic given that at least some innocent people are irrefutably being convicted.<\/p>\n

Yet the key point would seem to be that this is not a data-driven decision for most people.\u00a0 It is a moral one.\u00a0 Or at least that’s how most people seem to rationalize it.<\/p>\n

I strongly suspect that the lion’s share of people are not as morally certain about capital punishment as they claim, or at least not as unconditional in their opposition or favor of it.<\/p>\n

To be clear, I’m not talking about personal life and death situations here.\u00a0 A bad guy is holding a knife at your kid’s throat and you’ve got a clean temple shot, do you take it?\u00a0 For most of us, absolutely.\u00a0 But that’s a situation of imminent and immediate danger.\u00a0 And I will contend the morality of that situation is quite different from situations in which a group of people not in present danger make a choice to end someone else’s life.\u00a0 The question is not whether or not you would ever kill.\u00a0 Rather, at its root, the question is whether or not society has the right, as a group, to take another life.\u00a0 (The government being, ostensibly, just a manifestation of society or of a group of people.)<\/p>\n

Many people do claim they are morally and unequivocally opposed to capital punishment. The assertion is that government, and by extension, society, doesn’t have the right to kill.\u00a0 Yet, in a very real sense, we the people make all kinds of life and death decisions.<\/p>\n

As a country, we wage wars.\u00a0 When that happens we know that people on both sides will die.\u00a0 We may not individually choose who dies, but as a group we are sending other human beings to their death.<\/p>\n

The National Organ Transplant group makes more specific life and death decisions every day.\u00a0 People specifically choose winners and losers, and the losers die.<\/p>\n

These may seem like off-topic references, but in these and many more cases, society chooses to sacrifice some people for the greater good.\u00a0 Clearly, we’re already on the slippery slope, but arguably this doesn’t specifically address death as punishment.\u00a0 Perhaps we can draw a line there.<\/p>\n

But even death as punishment gets a little fuzzy.\u00a0 Consider that today the U.S. military executed<\/a> Anwar al-Awlaki.\u00a0 The guy was a very influential al-Qaida operative, but he was also a U.S. citizen.\u00a0 Remember back in May when Seal Team 6 famously dispatched Osama bin Laden?\u00a0 How were these not examples of capital punishment?\u00a0 Either of those guys could have been captured, returned to the States for trial, and held for life in a maximum security facility.\u00a0 Yet very few people advocated for that.<\/p>\n

The practical matter remains that the objective of removing dangerous people is the increased safety and security of our citizens.\u00a0 Sending a local serial killer to prison for life accomplishes that.\u00a0 Capturing bin Laden does not.\u00a0 His followers would have created additional threats for Americans were he only in jail.\u00a0 We are safer if he’s dead.\u00a0 Many people who are adamant the death penalty is immoral would acknowledge that.\u00a0 Therefore, it seems clear that, with the exception of true pacifists, moral opposition to capital punishment has its limits.<\/p>\n

At the other end of the spectrum, people finding the death penalty morally sound tend to find boundaries somewhat more easily. \u00a0 It’s a pretty rare person that advocates capital punishment for jay-walking or shoplifting.\u00a0 Even the most ardent Evangelical stops short of arguing for stoning people who picks up sticks on Saturday as commanded by the Lord in Numbers 15:32-36.\u00a0 There are arguments to had with regard to how heinous the crime should be to warrant the death penalty, but basically everyone agrees there are limits to its application.<\/p>\n

My personal position is that I do not consider myself morally opposed to capital punishment.\u00a0 I do find there are rare but real situations in which it is the sentence that achieves a demonstrably greater good for society.\u00a0 And I do firmly believe that society gets to make decisions in its collective best interest, and that such decisions may extend to the well-being or even the life of individuals. However, in large part, I do find the death penalty is expensive, ineffective, and impractical.\u00a0 It is very nearly almost never the best solution.<\/p>\n

That said, I also believe it’s morally reprehensible to support the death penalty out of a sense of vengeance<\/a>.\u00a0 And whether they admit it to themselves or not, many, if not most, advocates will find vengeance at the core of their motivation.\u00a0 They may cite religious morality in terms of Old Testament support for retributive punishment, or they may talk about justice and how the person deserved to die for what they did.\u00a0 Regardless, it all comes back to some form of Godly or personal vengeance.\u00a0 And I can’t abide that.<\/p>\n

While it’s important to understand your position, it’s perhaps more important to have explored the boundaries of that position as well as the underlying motivations that led you there.\u00a0 So where are you?\u00a0 And why?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I do not consider myself morally opposed to capital punishment. But I do believe it’s morally reprehensible to support the death penalty out of a sense of vengeance.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[140,21,141,20,142],"class_list":["post-3852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-religion","tag-capital-punishment","tag-conservatives","tag-crime","tag-liberals","tag-morality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3852"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3852\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3866,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3852\/revisions\/3866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}